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TopIntroduction
The advent of globalization and the current economic climate have brought about greater challenges to today’s organizations and societies. Knowledge is being more and more recognized as a valued asset in competitive environments and is increasingly at the core of modern organizations (Ho, Hsieh & Hung, 2014). Therefore, in this turbulent and challenging era, organizations must make the best use of their knowledge-based activities in order to sustain their competitive advantage (Valaei, Nikhashemi & Javan, 2017).
Jennex (2005) argues that Knowledge Management (hereafter KM) facilitates the selective application of knowledge from previous experiences of decision making with the scope of improving Organisational Effectiveness (hereafter OE). Jennex, Smolnik and Croasdell (2009) argue that KM success is defined by “capturing the right knowledge, getting the right knowledge to the right user, and using this knowledge to improve organizational and/or individual performance” (p. 174). Successful KM projects have been shown to have beneficial effects on organizations by impacting positively business processes, KM strategy, leadership/management support and knowledge content (Jennex, Smolnik & Croasdell, 2016). The pharmaceutical sector is a particularly knowledge intensive sector and therefore uniquely posited to benefit from KM initiatives that could help organizations remain competitive and become more effective.
Researchers in the KM field have stressed the importance of evaluating enablers and processes of KM to understand the successes and failures of any KM initiatives undertaken by an organization (Nejatian, Nejati, Zarei and Soltani 2013; Singh, 2018). Jennex and Olfman (2005, 2006) have focused their KM research in this direction, identifying twelve KM critical success factors (e.g. management support, technological resources and KM strategy) and proposing a KM Success Model which was re-examined and updated by Jennex (2017). However, KM researchers have also lamented about the lack of empirical analysis of the individual effects of KM enablers on KM processes (Lee, Kim & Kim, 2012). Furthermore, the literature on KM processes as a mediating mechanism between KM enablers and OE is lacking and the relationships between KM processes and OE have not been studied sufficiently (Ugwu, 2018; Zheng, Yang & McLean, 2010).
Based on the above discourse, the aims of this study are threefold. First, it aims at exploring the individual effects of a number of KM enablers (e.g. KM strategy, transformational leadership) on KM processes. Second, the mediating role of KM processes in the relationship between KM enablers and OE will be examined thus helping to address a gap in the literature on mediation. Third, it aims to explore the relationship between KM processes and OE by adopting a decomposed approach for the KM processes.
This paper begins with laying out the context of this research that is the Maltese Pharmaceutical Sector. It continues by providing an explanation of the theoretical framework adopted in this study and subsequent hypotheses development together with the hypothesized model used. This is followed by a section describing the method used for conducting the online survey, the findings of the survey and a description of the results obtained from the data analysis. A discussion of the results is followed by the study’s theoretical and managerial contributions, limitations and suggestions for further research.
TopContext
The pharmaceutical sector is an important business sector for the Maltese economy. The year 2016 was a record year for the Maltese Pharmaceutical Sector with €882 million worth of pharmaceutical products exported making up approximately 22% of the total exports of Malta for that period (NSO News Release, 2018).